Communication systems and architectures have become increasingly important in today's society. In compression scenarios, network operators generally seek to produce high percentages of gain in compression for any given transport that is being implemented. In a given architecture that supports certain types of compression, it is common that a number of long haul (e.g. T1/E1) links are used between network devices (e.g. routers) that support the compression and decompression functions. In the course of compression, three links could be mapped to two long haul packet links, or four links could be mapped to three long haul packet links, thereby affording cost saving to the network operator.
To achieve compression, slots from various links are generally multiplexed on each long haul link. During such compression operations, long haul link failures can be problematic. Since the traffic from all the links is generally multiplexed and because the multiplexed traffic is then sent over any of the long haul links in a non-deterministic way, all the associated calls suffer deterioration as the remaining long hauled links get overloaded. If about one third of the frames are dropped for each call, frame synchronization will be lost for each call. In addition, such a scenario would most likely lead to call dropping issues. Clearly, complete outage due to the loss of one (or just a few links) is not desirable. Accordingly, the ability to provide a communications system that minimizes the effects of link failures, packet losses, and call drops presents a significant challenge for network operators, service providers, and system administrators.